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When I first began teaching, I worked for a private Christian school in Minneapolis. I was initially hired to teach Studio Art and Art History, but being a small school in the midst of rapid growth, I was asked to teach additional courses. I ultimately added Old Testament, New Testament, and Church History to my teaching repertoire.

One of the good things about this school was that these courses were presented with an historic take, the Bible being the “story of the ancient Hebrews and early Church” rather than a generic Sunday School format. I taught these courses for ten years and trained other teachers in these subjects as well, thoroughly enjoying our human drama as told by ancient writers.

Now, as I paint and make art, I find that many themes from these ancient writings pop up in my imagery. The digital piece, “Genesis” is inspired by the creation story, when God breathed life into a lump of clay, which then became man. This image tries to visually capture that moment just before consciousness and self-awareness initiate. It’s the moment JUST before the face opens his eyes for the first time.

If we can imagine our “awakening” or transformation from one state to another, then we can maybe relate to this painting.

Have you ever found yourself on a road that leads down a specific path? You look around from time to time and see some interesting things along the side of the road. A rabbit jumps out of the way. A rusty bike looms into view as you pass by. Trees, houses in the distance and a panoramic sky encompass your view. You sigh with curiosity, but continue on your way. After all, there’s no time to take in the sights. You have chosen your path, and your road leads to your goal.

You round a bend, and smack!

A tree has decided to explode out the ground, blocking your way. Your track, your road, your goals are in shambles. Panic sets in as you try to come to terms with this hazard.

You think, “This isn’t right! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!”

Life has thrown you a curve. How do you respond?

This photo I took last year resonates with much of my life. I was raised a certain way, taught to believe and trust in specific institutions. I raised my children similarly as I walked on my road towards what I thought was how things were supposed to be. Then, smack! My road was suddenly blocked, and I was forced to take a different path.

Oddly enough, looking back, I can see the tree as less a hindrance, and more a life-giver. The rusty institutions rotting as the tree grows and brings change, growth and evolution.

A common overheard statement usually borne out of frustration. Too much water on bad paper with no means of control leads to scrubbed fibers and grey-brown blobs of pigment supposed to represent a still-life apple.

Been there. Done that.

For some reason, I was lucky enough to be able to get my BA in Fine Art without ever having to deal with watercolors. For me, they remained a junior high experiment in creative failure and messy tables. I tried them once, couldn’t work with them, and walked away deciding to NEVER work with such a stupid medium again.
How fate laughs at my decisions…

A few years after getting my degree, I found myself TEACHING watercolors to junior high boys and girls. I feared that my failures of the past would catch up with me, invalidating myself in front of critical adolescent eyes. I swallowed my pride and asked another art teacher for advice.

As many artists are, she was more than eager to show her watercolor skills and reveal how she tamed the beast. In the end, learning watercolors was rather simple, once I understood a few things about pigment, water, the right paper, brushes and the use of paper towel.

Looking back, I recall beginning my journey into abstract art using watercolors. I see that they were my first love.

There was a point in my life when convention ruled my every moment. I had the house, the kids, the career. I was associated with the right groups. I participated in the right activities, read the right books and listened to the right radio stations. My life had become conventional. My only adventure was railing at the elements as my car got stuck in the snow…again.

Whatever happened to the imaginative kid who climbed into department store trash bins and brought home treasures? The kid who wanted to work out a solution for a better tire inner tube? Make a running go-cart out of a broken lawn mower engine? All that got swallowed into the convention void.

I was doing everything “right” but was extremely unhappy. Somewhere along the line I was misled. Convention did not satisfy. I became suicidal.

While wallowing in this darkness, I heard a whisper, “Dare to jump?”

At that low point in my life, I could have easily pulled over on the freeway and leapt off an overpass.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I doodled.

I doodled, and drew, and drew and doodled. In meetings, at church, at conferences I was known to draw. I began to not care so much about how I was “supposed” to act, about convention because these doodles fed my soul. I began getting in touch with myself, rediscovering that kid who always made “stuff”.

I knew from the time I was four years old that I was going to be an artist when I grew up. Convention, however, robbed me of that vision. I had surrounded myself with myths about the Artist: the tortured, self-indulgent freak who can never make a decent living.

As I doodled and re-introduced myself to me, I realized I had a choice to make. I could remain sorely depressed in the conventional world, or, I could jump and become the person I was designed to be: an artist.

A couple of weeks ago I experienced some discomfort in my back. I’ve had some back pain issues in the past and this seemed to be nothing new. I stretched as usual and spent the day walking along the Lake Michigan Shoreline with close friends. My back however, never seemed to loosen up. In fact, it was tightening more and more. When I returned home, I laid flat on the ground, giving my lower back a break, and dozed off for a few minutes.

When I awoke and attempted to roll over, the entire left side seized up in a severe spasm. Pain exploded from my lower back and shot out the top of my head. I broke out in sweats and had to breath my way through the spasm. Each little movement caused another spasm as I struggled with help to get to a chair. Needless to say, the pain of a herniated disk controlled my life for the next few days.

I’m am high school art teacher by day, and when I returned to school I felt like a drugged-up Frankenstein limping down the hallway with a torturous back-brace holding my midsection together. The spasms had subsided, but the pain and weakness remained. It was all I could do to teach classes.

T Zuber, The Puppet (Sketch), 2014

Then I had a prep period.

Instead of grading or preparing another lesson, I decided to draw. I needed to do something to get me away from the constant throb plaguing my spine and pelvis. From another art teacher, I acquired some large paper and a soft Ebony pencil, and, using my arm, began to draw in wild gestures. I soon got into my right brain and the pain seemed further and further away. The act of creating took me out of myself; out of my time and place.

Thomas Zuber, The Puppet, 2015

For a moment, all pain subsided, as I swam in the creative muse, giving vision to my situation.

That experience gave birth to a pencil sketch, leading to a lager acrylic on canvas painting entitled, “The Puppet”. It’s an abstract expression of my experience of being controlled by my pain. It’s large, dark and “stabby”. I would guess that anyone who has experienced a pain that caused cold sweats could relate.

I’m better now. The spasms have ceased and I’m on the road to recovery. While I can’t say that I’m happy to have suffered through this, I can say that I was able to harness my pain and create something through it. I experienced creativity in a new way upon which I hope to build.

Have you ever walked into a gallery and be taken by surprise by how effectively a painting communicates an idea or emotion? As an artist and teacher I regularly talk about visual communication and how art is constantly speaking to an audience. This process can be obvious in literal and realist art, but what about abstract art? Does the visually abstract effectively communicate?

This past weekend I participated in a local art event called Art in the Barn which took place in Goshen, IN. The large two-story barn was packed with art, performers and a varied audience. Eight of my abstract paintings were hung along one wall on the second story. As people wandered around, one couple had quite a discussion about my piece entitled, “Journey’s End”. The gentleman saw a series of horses and people in this work. He was adamant about it, and moved his wife and myself into his place on the floor while he pointed out his interpretation. “Of courses it’s called ‘Journey’s End’ because these people are coming home from a horseback ride.” I told him that other people saw figures and a sunset. It didn’t matter what I said. He was convinced that I painted horses.

To be honest, when I starters this piece I set two rules for myself: Create an abstract painting and bring to life something that has never before existed. Get away from oranges and reds and use a cool-colored palette. As I worked, the piece took on a life of its own. I continued to keep it abstract and (mostly) cool colored using violets and blues slightly warmed with some reds and yellows. I worked on it sideways, flipped it upside down and mentally conversed with the canvas, brushes and pigments. In the end, it looked like two figures walking away from me (the audience). It was complete when I began to see this as a metaphor for life and death, “Journey’s End”

Thomas Zuber, Journey Home, Acrylic on Canvas, 2014

I stopped working on it because it’s an abstract piece that communicates something very specific to me. However, one of the many joys of abstract art is that communication can remain open and varied. Each person brings themselves to an interpretation conversation with the abstract. As an artist I’ve learned that the audience will converse and have varying conclusions about my work.

My abstract work is communicating. People formulate their own interpretations. The magic of art is working and I’m okay with that.

By day I teach. By night, I create. Teaching high school art is messy, productive and simultaneously tiresome and energizing. However, after students leave the building, I have time to relax, to paint, and to think beyond the myriad of adolescent issues with which I’ve had to deal since 7:00 am.

One of the courses I teach encompasses digital photography and filmmaking. The classroom in which I predominantly teach I is a Mac Lab with 32 IMac machines. Over in a corner, however, I keep my paints; my acrylics, my canvases and easel. This is MY corner, MY studio in which I push myself to be free from convention and give myself permission to “abstract” colors, forms and movements. I begin by making marks, and see where that journey ends.

School here began August 5th (yes, way too soon!), and I have had very little time to crawl into my studio and paint. Until yesterday, when I had about an hour to revisit my corner, put on my apron, break out the paints and begin another journey into the undefined. I was listening to some power blues rock, becoming unaware of the time and place as I mixed and sponged and brushed my pigments.

Then my phone rang. The magic ended. I was brought back to reality. I needed to pick up my son for dinner. I quickly cleaned my brushes, wrapped up my corner and took off my apron. Locking up the room, I was distracted by something and looked down to see a smear of Indian Yellow acrylic paint on my olive-green polo shirt!

Rather than get upset at destroying yet another shirt, I simply thought to myself, “Now I have a new painting shirt.” It will remind me to paint, to create, to be the artist I was made to be. My new shirt is my new inspiration.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around abstract pictures formed in my mind’s eye. When I was about four years old (or earlier; time meant little to me then), I remember thinking of the days of the week as abstract assemblies of light, colors, lines and negative spaces mashed together in individual patterns. Sunday was more vertical, while Monday and Friday looked similarly horizontal. Wednesday, the middle of the week, was the only organically shaped day. The entire week followed a “D” contour with the weekend being the short, straight line, Monday at the top of the curve, then Tuesday, Wednesday at the middle of the curve, Thursday and finally Friday at the bottom of the “D”. Seasons likewise followed a similar, but horizontal, “D”-shaped pattern where summer was the short, straight line.

I assumed everybody thought this way. Imagine my shock and frustration when my mother showed me a calendar! Every day was a square, which, boringly, looked like every other day! It took my four-year-old brain a long time to process this grid-like structure, and to accept the fact that most people seem to plan their lives according to little, boring squares!

It was about this time that I began to draw.

I never cared much for coloring books, and hated the structure of heavy black lines that you were supposed to remain within. I was lucky, however, to have my aunt. Aunt Elinor, an artist, always seemed to have blank, white, paper with her whenever she came over to visit. I would sidle up to the end table, find a broken blue crayon, and scribble. She always encouraged me, and, in her soothing voice told me all kinds of wonderful things she saw in my drawings. In time, my scribbles became boats with stacks and faces. By the time I entered kindergarten, I knew what I was going to be when I grew up.

I had found my calling. I was to be an Artist!

Some forty odd years later, I am mentally exploring my early years. Mining my memory for experiences before schooling, before my traditional classical education, before the structure of the “calendar”. The essence of my being is returning to the time when I scribbled; to the time when my days of the week were abstract shapes, colors, movements and feeling.

It’s a difficult but rewarding process that I would encourage anyone to undertake.

That’s exactly what my first painting professor told me in college. At the time, I really didn’t know what to say to him or how to react. He was a little man, older than dirt, with a wave of white thick hair and heavy glasses perched upon a bulbous nose.

“You’re constipated Zuber! You’re your own worst enemy!”

Looking back I can see how true he was about my artistic journey. Up to that point, the majority of my high school training revolved around careful realistic renderings. I had been told to follow the rules. But in this class, there were NO RULES! In this collegiate environment of seeming artistic freedom, I found myself struggling with the internal art “rules” I had learned in high school. I was indeed “constipated” and my work became bound like an intestinal sludge, moving neither forward nor back.

It was along first semester of oil painting 101.

Years later those words come back to me as I teach advanced high school art. I see students struggling with what they “think” they should do. Rather than be loose, many of them begin by being bound within some sort of mentally established artistic framework. They think they need to do things one way, then jump through the academic hoop, create a spelled out project and move on.

I don’t teach this course that way.

Instead, I follow the advice of another college teacher who defined an artist as a creative thinker who makes their own test, then takes their test. In other words, the artist proposes a visual problem and works creatively to overcome that problem. How do I translate real flowers onto a canvas still life? How can I visually capture post-traumatic stress disorder? etc., etc.

Thinking this way allows me to become less bound by some mental construct and work loosely. It provides a way for me to appreciate the journey of creation as a vision is being born on canvas.

Do I still get constipated? Sometimes. But I have learned to recognize it and give myself permission to be loose with my paints. I have also learned to appreciate the training and avenues of thought I received from artist-teachers so many years ago.

I am an artist. I have attended many art festivals over the years. This year I finally mustered enough courage to participate in my first festivals. Two in two consecutive weekends. I am happy to say that I sold eleven pieces while opening doors for more exhibition opportunities.

Being a participant in these festivals is an interesting experience to say the least. As an artist, it’s often a scary thing to show off your work. You never know what the public is going to say especially if Abstract Expressionist Painting is your genre. Generally visitors are decent folks who step in the tent, look around and maybe ask a question or two. Some look and leave hoping to avoid personal interaction. Others just see my paintings and walk on, knowing that abstraction isn’t their thing.

At my last festival, during a lull in the crowd, I saw a tall older-looking man in overalls and John Deere baseball cap wander into my tent. The man ignored my Impressionist and more Realist paintings and walked up to my larger abstract acrylic-on-canvas paintings which hung on three sides of my exhibit. I was surprised that he seemed interested in the Abstract works. I greeted him, and let him look in silence. After a long pause he turned toward me and, looking down his nose, said,”If I had a couple of paint buckets with different colors in them, I could pour them out on a piece of canvas and make the same thing.”

It’s already difficult to show your artwork in a public setting. My paintings are almost like my children. I have gone on a journey with each and every one, and am personally connected with each painting I do. In the space of ten minutes this “gentleman” accepted my hospitality, entered my booth and proceeded to dismiss, denigrate and insult me and my art, my children.

My initial gut reaction was to defend my process and point out his ignorance of an entire artistic genre that, in some way or other, influenced the design of that stupid deer on his stupid John Deer hat that stuck to his tiny pea-brained, stupid little head… But I didn’t.

Instead, I paused, took a breath, and challenged his comment. I said, “Do it. Go ahead and get your paint buckets together and pour them out on canvas. I’d REALLY like to see it. In fact, take my card. Call me when you’re ready to paint.”

I think I threw him for a loop. He didn’t expect my reaction. It wasn’t necessarily defensive but it demanded a response that made the Mr. John Deer responsible for his comment.

His face going blank, he turned towards the exit and said, “You got some nice work.” and shuffled out of my tent. I didn’t make a sale, but learned a little about handling the negative influences that have, until recently, controlled my artistic life.